Boaters MiniWEB
seems like an ironic name for this interesting new hardware/service
product, as it's not remotely capable of Web surfing (or even
phone calls). Instead MiniWEB manages to wring a host of other useful,
and fairly thrifty, marine communications from the low-power, small-data-packet
architecture of the Orbcomm LEO satellite network. The transceiver is
a ruggedly built, book-size box, which only needs a VHF-style antenna.
It draws little power and can be left on continuously to automatically
download incoming e-mail, send your GPS position out as desired, or
even to deliver alarms when you're ashore.

Wiring the MiniWEB
communicator to antenna, power, GPS, and laptop sounds more complicated
than it actually was. In less than an hour, I was loading the system's
straightforward software and communicating via satellite. I was impressed.
With data limited to--and billed by--text characters (bytes),
it's important that the service make the most of each one. MiniWEB
does this in numerous ways. For instance, it has rigorous but simple-to-implement
e-mail filtering so that you don't find yourself paying to read
spam. And you can access your e-mail, including the filtered-out stuff,
when ashore via the Web to further minimize airtime costs. MiniWEB also
offers easy ways to turn a basic text e-mail into either a fax or voice
message on the land end, and has two options for getting location-specific
text weather forecasts.

If the transceiver
is wired to a GPS, you can send positions with any message or automatically
at regular intervals with a link to the appropriate chart on Maptech's
Web site. The optional boat-monitoring kit is fairly rudimentary, only
watching bilges and voltages, but MiniWEB is darn clever to let you
make use of the sat connection whether you're on or off the boat.

Orbcomm satellites
will not always be in sight of both you and a ground station, but the
resulting five- to 20-minute transmission lags won't matter much
to the sort of narrow band services described here. The good news for
adventurous cruisers is that coverage includes almost all of the Americas,
Europe, the Far East, and a lot of blue water. MiniWEB hardware starts
at $799 before options, and the premium service plan offers 8,000 characters
of messaging per month for $30, with added characters at $0.15 per 100.
The software nicely keeps track of characters used, and MiniWEB is a
rare communications service that offers a low maintenance charge when
you don't need to use it for months at a time. At presstime, MiniWEB
decided to fix the confusion over its name by changing it to Sky-Mate.